A Monday (Spring, 2011)

These dreams are like demons

Where ice breeds fibrous

Before you were born

You were an ocean.

Here, everyone is moving

Their apologies like smoke

Still under the new road

An older one flows.

_

Sunday, YSO

This street reaches

all the way to the sun

These neighborhoods

are always memories

These doors half open

are half done grins

Blind, your own fool

and so ready for life

_

Happen

The quad is slippery with yesterday’s snow

His gaze is slippery with diffidence

Do I remember him?

I do! Mike! One of the best students in his class

But it’s another semester

And there’s another Mike in another class

Almost as good, just as loved.

Why do I love them anyway?

These Caitlins (F), Mikes (M), Alexes (F/M)

Love while it lasts, a semester’s worth

I mark them, meaning to mark their minds

_

Fish needs bicycle

Last spring, I taught Transnational Feminisms. Which was *wonderful*--but you know, they were the choir, there was absolutely no need to preach.

This year, I begged to be assigned the introductory Women’s Studies course with some romantic activist notion of grooming forty feminists out of a cohort of “my advisor says I have to take this course to graduate.”

Yeah. You know how this is going already. There were so many assertions of post-feminism and accusations of “reading too much into things.”

Until this: http://twitter.com/rulesforgirls

_

Old friends and older teachers

My high school FB group posted a newspaper article about our old P.E. teacher. And although I used to be terrified of her (mostly because of her somewhat bossy habit of checking if we were indeed wearing regulation bloomers under our Catholic school uniforms), it made me really nostalgic for days when my main fear was about getting picked to shoot hoops.

And on the same FB group page, an appeal for funds for another teacher whose husband has dementia. The end of Goodbye Mr. Chips always made me cry, and this does too.

_

Report

A clue that maybe listening to a lot of classical music

can make you a little too laidback:

"There will be snow tomorrow, mostly between the hours of 2 a.m. and 11 p.m."

Dude. Kind of unhelpful, you know.

Anyway. I’ve always wanted to ice-skate—

and today, I did.

A beautiful, curlicue “q”.

On the way to school/preschool/work,

in our sweet-silly, snub-nosed car.

Baby A squealed;

Li’l A gasped;

I trembled.

Fair to say we were all really surprised

and delighted/ excited /

outright panicked.

_

Questionnaire

Standing in the middle of all time

Ghosts and maharajas stare

We maintain tunes

Cartoons

The midday limbers

Like painted cake

Are you well?

Did you eat?

These twisted bases

are all alike

and all wrong

so I like them all

__